The Ballad of Sir Jasper
by cynic.in.a.fishbowl
Summary: Based on the only song ever to have been categorically banned from the New South Wales Public Schools State Music Camp.  She's a very naughty lady indeed.
1. Inspiration, Explanation and Lyrics

Recently I went on the NSW Public schools state music camp. In between rehearsals and such, much singing went on. Incidentally, there was one song, which many of the students knew, but which had been forbidden due to its questionable content. That song is 'The Ballad of Sir Jasper'.

The Ballad of Sir Jasper is sung to the tune of the chorus of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, to the following lyrics:

"_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch me._

_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch me._

_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch me!"_

_As she lay between the lily-white sheets with nothing on at all._

_She's a very naughty lady._

_She's a very naughty lady._ [incidentally, everybody starts harmonising at this point]

_She's a very naughty lady,_

_As she lay between the lily-white sheets with nothing on at all._

The next verse goes as follows:

"_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch._

_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch._

_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch!"_

_As she lay between the lily-white sheets with nothing on at all._

Then comes another verse of '_She's a very naughty lady_', followed by '_Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't!_'; '_Oh, Sir Jasper, please!_'; '_Oh, Sir Jasper!_'; '_Oh, Sir!_'; and finally, '_Oh!_', all of which are interspersed with harmonised verses of '_She's a very naughty lady_'.

As you can no doubt imagine, three hundred or so teenagers, all singing 'Oh, Sir Jasper!' degenerates rather quickly to three hundred or so teenagers making orgasm noises. Occasionally, in the third verse (Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't!), someone starts with a descant of platitudes like 'I'm too young!' or 'I'm saving myself for marriage!'. Needless to say, it's marvellously fun.

Either way, this gave me a bit of an idea for a fic.

Each chapter will be from the point in the relationship reflected in the verse (I'm ignoring the '_She's a very naughty lady_' choruses). This should be interesting…


	2. Oh, Sir Jasper, Please Don't Touch Me

Oh, Sir Jasper, please don't touch me.

Rebecca was starting to feel rather grim. A pre-med student at UW, she knew how much blood a person could stand to lose before they passed the point of either no return, or otherwise the point from which you didn't want to return. She was getting pretty darn close to that point.

She'd done her best to get tourniquets onto the major wounds (that is to say, all of them) before shock set in and rendered her more or less useless, a prisoner in her own body, but even so, she hadn't been fully successful [A/N]. Not only that, bus as if to add insult to injury, one of her lungs had collapsed.

All in all, things weren't looking good.

All things considered, she was lucky to be able to reflect on her life in the little time she had left. Because generally when one gets well and truly wasted by a grumpy vampire, one stays wasted. Regardless, she was remarkably comfortable considering her condition. As it turned out, breathing with a collapsed lung wasn't too difficult or unpleasant as long as she kept a clear head about it. So she sat, propped up against a log, waiting for unconsciousness. It was all she could do.

Everything was starting to get rather pleasantly blurry and altogether rather hazy when a face appeared. And as Luck seemed in a particularly vicious mood, it was the face of a vampire. Rebecca had seen vampires before – when her hometown had been 'blown away by a tornado' it had in fact been a particularly brutal massacre. Returning home from college to find nothing, just an empty space where Dillon had stood, a compact disk had been left pinned to her windshield. She didn't know who had filmed it, much less why they had left it there, but it had explained everything.

Thus when this vampire appeared, just when that warm fuzzy feeling was starting to overtake her, she was reasonably put out.

"Can you hear me?" his voice sounded distant, and somewhat muffled. Even so, she could detect a slight Texan accent in the way he formed his vowels.

"Fuck off and let me die in peace." It turned out that the adrenalin rush from being so close to one of them was allowing her to get in a few last insults. If there was a life after her death, she intended to thank whomever had the idea of installing kidneys and all their glands.

"Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass. Nice work on the tourniquets by the way." He seemed to be giving her injuries a once over.

"The last thing I need or want is a bloody vampire buggering up my last moments. I am so not in the mood."

The vampire seemed incredibly aggravated. "You'll thank me later." Is all he said, before the warm fuzzy feeling returned, and everything went dark.

When everything stopped being dark, Rebecca was incredibly unimpressed. It seemed that her life after death was to be spent in a hospital. Of all the places. Clearly she had pissed off someone high up at some point. Seeing that her situation couldn't conceivably get worse, she let out a few choice obscenities. At least, she noted, in the afterlife someone had seen fit to reinflate her lung.

"You're a very naughty lady, aren't you." Remarked an incredibly dry voice to her left, outside if her field of vision. Sitting up (she hadn't really noticed she was lying down when she awoke), Rebecca looked over to see the same bloody vampire which had tried to ruin her last moments. And now, it seemed, he'd be ruining her eternity afterwards as well. Bastard. "Where on earth did you pick up eloquence like that?"

"Alright. I'm dead. I recognise that. Now would you please fuck off so that I can spend the rest of eternity enjoying my torment?" Whichever deity she had angered, she had clearly done a good job of it, she was connected to all kinds of tubes and beeping machines (the majority of which, she knew from classes, were largely obsolete the moment a patient was awake).

"I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but you are in fact alive. Very much so. Thanks, largely, to the fact that I knocked you out and sought medical treatment for you against your will."

"You did what?" asked Rebecca, at a loss even for obscenities.

"After you made it so abundantly clear you knew I was a vampire, I got all intrigued. So I decided not to let you die, as you so wished to. That and the fact that my mind-reading brother and I have a bet going as to who can save the most humans in a decade. Thanks to you, I am well in the lead."

"You sanctimonious dickwad. You kept me alive just for fun, when I expressly asked to be let alone. What possessed you to think that was a good idea?"

"You were irritated. You were more or less at peace, but you were still irritated. Clearly, you didn't wholeheartedly want to die." He had a look of absolute reason on his face.

"I was irritated…" Rebecca had to work hard to keep her blood pressure low enough not to trigger any warnings. If, as he alleged, she was alive, she was clearly in an ICU, and anything too far above normal would bring a nurse running in, and that would mean the end of her opportunity to grill this self-important (and somewhat insane, seeing as he hadn't just gone all omnomnom on her in her weakened state) asshole. "I was irritated because my LUNG HAD COLLAPSED. That's the kind of thing to put a dent in a girl's day. After what your lot have done to me already, you just had to prolong the suffering instead of just letting me do what I wanted."

"My lot?" he seemed intrigued. "I take it you mean vampires?"

"Yes, I mean vampires." The idiot really wasn't catching on.

"And what, precisely have vampires done to you? Apart from placing you in your current situation, of course."

Rebecca was unable to answer as at that moment a nurse came in. "You're awake." She remarked in a tone which seemed almost surprised. Perhaps she had been wasted worse than she had originally thought. Turning to the irritating presence to her left, she said "You really shouldn't be here."

He handed her a piece of paper. "I'm here until Sherriff Swan is able to sort things out like who she is and where she's from."

The nurse read the offending piece of writing. "Uh-huh." She sounded unimpressed. "Well you no doubt know the drill. Don't unplug anything." She left, muttering to herself about idiot hikers. She had a point there.

"So." He said, with a concerning tone of enthusiasm. "Who are you. You didn't have any ID with you, so everyone's all intrigued as to who you are."

"Give me one good reason why I should not only refrain from screaming rape, but ought to in fact talk to you."

"I saved your life." He said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Rebecca could not believe her ears. "In case you hadn't already realised, we've established that I didn't want my life to be saved, and thus the fact that you saved it, against my will, does not count at all in your favour. You've got thirty seconds before things start getting really awkward, really fast." She wasn't joking.

"I'll help you wreak sweet vengeance upon whoever did this to you?" that response took him a full twenty-five seconds to come up with.

It was also a mightily good one. "I'll play. My name is Rebecca Taylor. I'm from Dillon, Texas. According to record, the town was blown clean away by a Tornado. It wasn't. It was massacred rather thoroughly by vampires. Which is incidentally how I knew what you were. The one who attacked me was a tall, reasonably nondescript skinny boy with rather long floppy dark blonde hair. Other than that, I was too busy not dying immediately."

His hand reached for hers in what he no doubt meant to be a gesture of comfort. "Don't fucking touch me. Just please don't touch me." She'd been through too much shit with that one vampire to suddenly be all hunky-dory with this one.

"Sorry. I take it that's something which will become clear after many hours of intense psychoanalysis."

"That would be correct."

"Fine then. I'm Jasper Whitlock. Folks round here know me as Jasper Hale, and it would be nice if things stayed that way. I was born near Houston in 1843, and following some questionable actions both by myself and others, I ended up here."

"Questionable?"

"I've seen things you wouldn't believe."

"Now you're just quoting Bladerunner."

"Roy was by far the best character in the film."

"I'll concede that point. Gosh you're old. I was born in '91 and was starting to feel all agèd."

"I hate to get all serious when we were finally having an obscenity-free conversation and all, but when the sherriff comes, it would be nice if you had your story straight. Because we both know you can't say a vampire did it." He had a half smile as if the prospect of her telling the truth was a humorous one.

After a moment's consideration, Rebecca had to agree. "How about a mountain lion. They're reasonably nasty if provoked."

"I'm not so sure." He said, clearly thinking. "The wounds are pretty improbable coming from a cat. I'm thinking a bear. A really big, scary bear. But it was all a blur, so you can't really explain what happened."

"You've put a lot of thought into this." She noted. "Have you done this before?"

"I did say questionable, didn't I?"

**A/N:** Anyone who has experienced shock or heatstroke will know what I'm describing. There's this horrible feeling when your brain realises what's wrong, and is able to figure out courses of action, but your body has more or less shut down and is thus not doing as it's told. Basically you're completely reliant on others until your condition has been remedied enough for your body to do what it's told.


	3. And Now for a Word from our Sponsors

As of a few minutes ago, some champion of an anonymous reviewer informed me of the fact that there's a third verse to the song.

Thank you, excellent person. You have made my life a hell of a lot easier by giving me another verse to work with. Because as it turns out, fics of fixed length are hellishly hard.

This as yet unheard of (at least by me) verse goes as follows:

_She wears a flannel nightie in the summer when it's hot_

_And she wears her pink pyjamas in the winter when it's not_

_And sometimes in the springtime and sometimes in the fall_

_She lays between the lily-white sheets with nothing on at all._


End file.
